Typhoons, floods, and civil strife in this part of the world tend to feature not just on the TV news bulletins, but also make life tougher for the world’s largest food company by sales.

Tough but not impossible, for despite the various local problems, the maker of Nestlé coffee, KitKat chocolate bars and Maggi soup Thursday reported an increase in its annual sales and profit, in line with expectations.

After all people still need to eat.

But it’s also clear that emerging markets are slowing their rapid rise. For Nestlé, sales generated in emerging markets, for so long the driver of growth, slowed their rate of increase during the year to 11% from 13.3% in 2011.

In Zone Asia Oceania Africa, the decline was to 8.4% organic growth from nearly 12% in 2011, in part due to-one offs during the third quarter such as the demonstrations in Pakistan that led to five days of lost distribution, typhoons in the Philippines that resulted in factories closing there for a week. There were also disruptions from the elections in Egypt, as well as the impact of the oil sanctions on Iran.

With such a vast area, problems like this are likely to remain ongoing hazards.

A calmer tone prevailed in equity markets Friday, as investors put their worries about Greece to one side, and focused instead on some better-than-expected French and German consumer confidence data.

We’ve trawled through today’s broker notes to provide you with a selection of the key ratings changes.

Deutsche Bank upgraded Siemens to “buy”, noting signs that the focus is shifting back towards profitability. It said Siemens has been disappointingly accident-prone in recent quarters, with sizeable losses on various contractual disputes.

Deutsche thinks that this was partly due to an excessive obsession with growth, coupled with an inadequate assessment of risks. It also said this was likely to have been the main cause of the poor share price performance and consequent depressed valuation.